Diocese of Durham
A Durham Cathedral Chorister has been specially selected to sing at St Paul’s Cathedral as part of a massed choir of cathedral choristers from around the country taking part in a fundraising concert on 27 April.
The concert is being organised by the Friends of Cathedral Music (FCM), which is raising money for its £10m Diamond Fund for Choristers, set up to provide funding towards cathedral choristership around the country.
The Diamond Fund has been created in the 60th year of FCM’s founding, in June 1956. The organisation has 4,000 members and each year hands out up to £300,000 in grants to help cathedral music departments and some churches both in the UK and overseas.
In recent years, mounting financial pressures on these choirs has meant that demand for FCM support now far exceeds the charity’s ability to help.
Chairman of the FCM, Professor Peter Toyne, said: “Unless something is done very soon the difficulties of finance and recruitment for cathedral choirs will threaten the very existence of this unique heritage.
“British cathedral choirs are acknowledged as the finest of their kind in the world and FCM stresses that the training young choristers receive provides them with valuable skills and attributes later in life. Adult choirs clearly benefit from a regular throughput of trained choristers and many big names in the musical world have passed through the cathedral choral tradition.” Also in Durham, Freemasons from the Provincial Grand Lodge of Durham visited the Cathedral at the weekend to see the fruits of their donations to the Cathedral’s £10 million Open Treasure exhibition experience.
The Freemasons set up an appeal whereby individual Freemasons and Lodges from around the Province were invited to sponsor a stone tile, which would be laid on the floor of the Great Kitchen. The final amount raised was £121,000, which was presented to Durham Cathedral last year.
Provincial Grand Master for Durham, Eric Heaviside, said: “The connection between the Freemasons and Durham Cathedral goes back a long way and we felt that raising money towards the stone floor of the Great Kitchen, where the Treasures of St Cuthbert will be displayed was a fitting and worthy cause.”